Hans van Manen has been called the Mondrian of ballet, the Versace of ballet, the Pinter of ballet and the Antonioni of ballet. His distinctive personal style mixes formal austerity and glassy elegance with erotic charge. Each of his pieces reveals our own passions and delusions, pride and solitude, our loud laughter and bitter tears. I start with nothing. The dancers stand waiting for you. You stand waiting for yourself. Without repertoire, there is no tradition.
And without tradition, there is no connection with all that has been done prior to the present. Tradition is not something of the past. Tradition is what we do with the past today. The future is about discovering the good things of the past and building on them. And the deeper ideas? Oh, I just leave them to the audience. I never mean more than what you actually see. I'm very bad at telling stories, and that's the reason why I never make full-length ballets.
I prefer to make it very short and be as precise as possible. But I mean true curiosity. Born in Nieuwer Amstel in In he joined the Ballet van de Nederlandse Opera, where he created his first ballet, Feestgericht Later he joined Roland Petit's company in Paris. He began to work with the Nederlands Dans Theater in , first as a dancer until , next as a choreographer, then as Artistic Director β For the following two years he worked as a freelance choreographer before joining the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam in He is one of the few choreographers who has managed to popularize contemporary dance as a mixture of classical ballet and modern dance.
Being an author of over ballets performed worldwide, van Manen is deservedly considered one of the most established choreographers of contemporary ballet. His personal style is always recognizable. Typical for his works clarity of lines and simplicity of composition are born from the chosen musical material, but the choice itself is, as a rule, rather eclectic.
Despite all the emotional richness, the characters of his ballets are never sentimental. The core thing is that he spellbinds the audience with an exceptional, utterly polished beauty of movement. This question sounds as frequently as this title appears near his name.
